Geisha A-Go-Go: Katy Perry’s AMAs Performance Stirs Debate

Katy Perry performs onstage during the 2013 American Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on November 24, 2013 in Los Angeles, California.

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These were the American Music Awards, never the high point of televised trophy-tossing tastefulness to begin with. But as the Cirque du Sayonara spectacle of Katy Perry’s opening number unfurled, my jaw slowly dropped until it nearly rested against my collarbone.

There was Perry, in full kimono, tabi socks, lacquered hair and geiko pancake, belting out her latest smash hit. Her traditional outfit had been tightened at the bust with a triangular cutout designed to accentuate rather than flatten her generous bosom, and the sides cut to the waist to expose her pearlescent American legs. And she was surrounded by a throng of acrobatic maiko, their faces rollered with fat streaks of kabuki makeup, who provided energetic fan-flapping as backup — at least until they started flying and somersaulting through the air.

In short, this was a a full-barreled technicolor assault on a quarter-millennium-old set of traditions that would’ve given any self-respecting denizen of Kyoto’s Gion District a massive fatal heart attack. But Perry’s whiteface/yellowface performance was also a harsh reminder of how deeply anchored the archetype of the exotic, self-sacrificing “lotus blossom” is in the Western imagination.

You see, Perry’s new single is called “Unconditionally,” and unlike her usual anthems to sassy pubescence, it’s a song that’s basically about being a doormat for the very special loutish Englishman in your life:

Unconditional, unconditionally
I will love you unconditionally
There is no fear now
Let go and just be free
I will love you unconditionally

So come just as you are to me
Don’t need apologies
Know that you are all worthy
I’ll take your bad days with your good
Walk through the storm I would
I do it all because I love you
I love you l love you

The juxtaposition of the song’s meaning and Perry’s geisha drag were hardly accidental: She’s invoking the iconic image of Cio-Cio-San, the titular “butterfly” from Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly — a young Japanese girl who takes a Western lover, is abandoned by him, and commits suicide upon discovering his betrayal.

One could interpret “Unconditionally” as Perry’s declaration of unremitting love for her ex-husband Russell Brand. And while Perry is too much of a roaring, tiger-eyed champion to go the way of Cio-Cio, the performance last night clearly was meant to use Madama Butterfly’s tired orientalist imagery as an ironic statement on her broken marriage.

A representative for Perry didn’t return a request for comment.

The thing is, while a bucket of toner can strip the geisha makeup off of Perry’s face, nothing can remove the demeaning and harmful iconography of the lotus blossom from the West’s perception of Asian women — a stereotype that presents them as servile, passive, and as Perry would have it, “unconditional” worshippers of their men, willing to pay any price and weather any kind of abuse in order to keep him happy.

The recent, hugely successful revivals of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s Broadway hit Miss Saigon — a florid modernization of Madama Butterfly set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War — are a sign of just how appealing this image of Asian womanhood remains, even today. For Asian Americans who’ve seen and experienced the corrosive consequences of the lotus blossom stereotype, the blithe acceptance of Miss Saigon’s ugly underlying themes in the pursuit of entertainment (and profit) is hugely frustrating.

“Miss Saigon is a play about a Vietnamese prostitute in desperate need of rescue from evil Vietnamese men and the war-torn Third World,” wrote poet Bao Phi, who organized the protests against the revival of the show that was staged in Minneapolis in October. “The Vietnamese woman shoots herself in the stomach so she can sing one last song while dying in the arms of the white man. When I was much, much younger, I ask my mom if she wants to go see this play, because it’s about Vietnam. She shakes her head and says, in Vietnamese, ‘that is not about us.’ She says it like she’s explaining to me that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist.”

Phi might as well have been shouting at the helicopter that descends on stage during the show’s noisy climax. The Minneapolis revival was a success, and it will continue on to three additional cities; the play has also been staged separately in Houston and Washington, D.C., and a major revival on London’s West End has already broken all box office records, selling $6.9 million in tickets in a single day — over twice the record set by “The Book of Mormon” in March of this year.

To be clear: The issue Phi and other activists have with Miss Saigon isn’t the character of Kim, the play’s Cio-Cio-San analogue. Yes, she’s a prostitute, yes, she falls in love with and is betrayed by a Western soldier, yes, she kills herself. But, per Phi, “I have no problem with stories about prostitutes, if they are written by prostitutes wanting to tell their story.”

The problem with Miss Saigon, and with Madama Butterfly, and yes, with Katy Perry’s “Unconditionally” performance, is fundamentally that they are all confabulations of Asia invented by non-Asian people, with little concern for cultural legitimacy and no attempt to offer historical context. And because there are so few authentically told stories with the size and dazzle of these, such spectacles have evolved into a kind of truth — imagined truth — and the fictional, fantastical “facts” embedded within them have become mashed up with reality.

Indeed, you can find plenty of Asians, including Asian women, who adore Miss Saigon and who call Madama Butterfly an epic romance. When I’ve talked to them, they all say variations of the same thing: Setting aside the tawdry exploitative aspects of these stories, what more beautiful way is there to express your love than dying for your lover?

My response is usually, “How about living for your lover?,” which draws a politely dismissive chuckle. That’s because the mundane “truthful” truths of living with someone and dealing with their morning breath and toilet seat infractions and snoring and tooth-grinding isn’t glamorous, in the manner of a knife to the throat or a bullet to the gut. And so these bigger-than-life stories about death live on.

There is the possibility that Miss Saigon could return to Broadway, given its huge opening in London. And just in case you can’t make it to the aptly named Great White Way, last year, producer Cameron Mackintosh told Hugh Jackman that if the “Les Miserables” movie was a hit, he’d invest in making a Miss Saigon movie. Presumably, the adaptation’s helicopter is getting fueled up as we speak.

Here’s an idea, Cameron: Why not just cast Katy Perry as your sliver-screen Kim? She obviously can play Asian, and it might just save us all a lot of time in the long run.

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My friends at the blog Disgrasian point out that this isn’t even the first time Perry has adopted a fauxriental look for an awards show — although it’s the first time she’s taken it to the stage. In 2011, she attended the MTV Video Music Awards carrying a parasol and dressed in an Atelier Versace cheongsam mini. She followed that up by wearing a Chinese calligraphy-printed Vivienne Westwood outfit to the American Music Awards. Despite the fact that outfits were Chinese and not Japanese in inspiration, they led to widespread oohs and ahhs from bloggers and the entertainment press questioning whether Perry was “interested in becoming a geisha.”

In the wake of last night’s showpiece, Jen Wang of Disgrasian threw cold water on that idea. “It’s just wish fulfillment,” she says. “Geishas are supposed to be skilled in music and dance, so Katy Perry would never actually be able to cut it.” Ouch!

Update: As part of a marketing partnership, the AMAs and Samsung Mobile tweeted this exclusive picture of Katy Perry backstage, prior to her geisha-a-go-go performance, scrawled with the line “I THINK I’M TURNING AMA” — a reference to the British band The Vapors’ 1980 song “Turning Japanese.” Do the AMAs and Samsung not realize that some people view the subject of that song as a racist metaphor for masturbation?